Call The Midwife

'Call The Midwife' is a snapshot into life as a midwife in one of the poorest suburbs of London in the 1950s when poverty was rife, conditions were crowded and women were caught in a cycle of childbearing and household drudgery. It is the last period of life when women's lives were decided entirely by pregnancy and childbirth.

Call The Midwife is ABC Television's big new Sunday night drama and it's a beauty! It follows the adventures of a young woman who begins work as a community midwife in a poverty stricken suburb of East London. In some parts of this series your jaw will drop as you see families with more than 20 children, venereal disease, incest and bone grinding poverty with families living four to a bed. You will also see neighbours who pull together, families that drop everything to celebrate the new arrival and mothers who bravely love every child they're given.

At times it seems that the producers have taken us back a hundred even a thousand years in time but in actual fact it was the 1950s in a London still paying the massive cost of the Second World War and with women still burdened with a life of drudgery and childbirth before the arrival of the pill.

One of the statistics which just blew my mind was that in this area of Poplar, East London, which was very crowded and very poor, there were between 150 and 200 births every month. After the pill, the birth rate dropped to four or five.

The medical credentials of this series is impecable the births are realistic and the main thing the series captures is the pause for wonderment that every birth creates. (Something my modern midwife friends tell me actually exists even in the most up to date delivery suite). The series is based on the best-selling memoirs of midwife Jennifer Worth. If you've had your own babies, the tiny newborns will have you oohing and ahhing as much as the slap dash parenting and lack of bathroom facilities will have you cringing.

"Call The Midwife" is a lovely, moving and amazing series... something you'll watch with different eyes now you're a parent.. let us know what you think.. it's on ABC 1 on Sunday nights and don't forget you've got the chance to catch up on the episodes you've missed by watching on ABC iview.